Conference Agenda

In her 2024 ambient electronic album Rewilding, Berlin-based Turkish artist Başak Günak improvises over and between fragments of past works. In doing so, she draws inspiration from the process of rewilding, mimicking how plants grow from cracks in the urban fabric and reshape the landscape. Likely due to the rarity of rewilding as a musical subject (let alone compositional procedure), the sonically-rewilded environment has yet to capture scholarly attention despite the questions it raises about the forces behind musical ecologies.

Rewilding scholarship often treats modernity and wildness as operating independently, where plants emerge “spontaneously” in compromised urban sites (Woodward 2012). Challenging this notion, I study Rewilding according to scholarship on ruderal or “rubbled” ecosystems (Denizen 2020, Stoetzer 2022), which identifies modernity as creating the fertile ground in which plants take root, as seen in bombed sites left by war. The ruderal ecosystem, then, presents not a clash of the urban and wild-botanical, but interplay therebetween facilitated by modernity. By reasserting modernity’s role in electronic-musical stagings of urban-ecological encounters, this frame of analysis supports discourse on organicism (Watkins 2018) and sonic materiality (Voegelin 2019) while contributing to emerging scholarship on biomimicry as a compositional method (Blinkhorn 2024).

Taking after ruderal ecology, I reveal that media of modernity (e.g., electronic music and the recorded album) are fundamental to Günak’s creation of flora and rubble throughout her album—destabilizing the aesthetics of “spontaneous” rewilding. Drawing upon scholarship by Anderton and Brooks-Conrad, I first study Günak’s construction of ruins, where fragments of previous works are arranged such that polyphony with new sounds becomes possible through cracks in the surface. Although improvisation could be construed as wild (Toop 2016), I argue that seamlessly evoking botanical wildness through improvisation is impossible: limitations arise from the precise control over sound afforded by electronic instruments (White 2022), and the recorded album’s inherently curated, fixed nature. I conclude that the wildness replicated in Rewilding is not attainable independently of modernity, but is instead wholly determined by it. In distilling the modern essence intrinsic to electronically-produced environmental music, I support ecomusicological discourse on how music, nature, and technology are interrelated.

As Melinda Weekes has argued, improvisation has remained a hallmark of the Gospel music tradition since its inception in the early twentieth century. From groups to individual singing acts, many have been known to employ the widely-regarded authentic convention of Gospel vocal singing known as the improvised ad-lib. Gospel vocalist Kim Burrell’s use of the ad-lib, however, brought about serious questioning of her spiritual status as an anointed singer in the Black Church community during her 2024 viral singing engagements. For example, Burrell began singing the well-known hymn, “Thank You, Lord” at one performance in late January 2024. Before completing the song’s introductory melodic phrase, Burrell interjected the ad-lib, “It’s a solo, God’s using me, don’t sing with me right now,” to a woman in the audience who began singing the popular worship song alongside her. Burrell essentially asserts her anointing, or divine calling, through the use of ad-libs to quiet a straggling audience member. This bold act sent the Gospel music community into a frenzy, igniting discourse on how anointing is delegated. Raymond Wise’s insightful commentary distinguishes between performances led by entertainment purposes compared to ones led by spiritual conviction, a key argument differentiating between anointing and authenticity.

Existing scholarship has not explored the way that anointing is bestowed in Gospel vocal singing. My paper differentiates between anointing and authenticity through an analysis of the controversy surrounding the vocal ad-libs of famed Gospel singer Kim Burrell. Specifically, I first define and situate these two concepts and then I apply Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor’s concept of a multilayered authenticity in folk music to Gospel music. I argue that anointing can be sullied due to one’s character or intent. Further, I use the case of the Burrell controversy to illustrate the two-fold manner in how anointing is assigned in Gospel music ministry, in that it requires both a divine appointment and community validation. The Burrell situation highlights the dynamic role that community plays in anointing, and that while there is a duty for vocalists to honor the conventions of the style, there is an equal one to avoid spiritual complacency.

From 1941 to 1952, the Soviet Union recognized contributions to arts and sciences with the Stalin Prizes. Prizes for the arts were awarded to artists upholding the highest standards of Soviet life and were deliberately designed to exclude folk and nationalistic music that did not directly support the Soviet Union. It is largely because of these prizes that many musical styles from Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia, and other Soviet republics remain relatively unknown today.

With 2025 marking both the seventeenth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Georgia and the third-year mark of its invasion of Ukraine, scholars increasingly are turning their attention to historiographical and disciplinary habits that continue to enforce Soviet-era values. Decolonization efforts in countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, for instance, have emphasized giving a voice to composers who were marginalized by Soviet societal norms. Recent work has detailed how Cold War-era, state-sponsored institutions used musicians to enforce their imperial identities, and how the Stalin Prizes were strongly swayed by party censorship. (Schmelz, Sharikadze, and Sigua 2024, Frolova-Walker, 2016) Musicology is now poised to interrogate how state honorifics such as the Stalin Prizes were not only used to colonize musical styles as Soviet, but also to inform how music scholars have engaged with the ideological term “Soviet music.” This paper investigates how musicology’s emphasis on Stalin Prize laureates, composers and musical styles celebrated for embodying Soviet ideals, has unwittingly made scholars complicit in Soviet colonization strategies.

This paper argues for a turn away from using such Cold War strategies in the study and performance of Eastern European classical music. It is only by casting off frameworks set up by the Stalin Prizes that composers overshadowed by Stalin Prize laureates will be returned to the mainstream they were excluded from, composers who remain marginalized some 80 years after the last Stalin Prize was awarded. It is these overlooked musical styles, who represent the cultures and societies marginalized by the Soviet reign, which are critical for assisting in European cultural decolonization efforts.

Perfect make-up, coifed hair, dazzling smiles, and glittering brass instruments take center stage in the all-girl band the Ingenues in their 1928 film The Band Beautiful and in promotional photographs of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm taken around ten years later, showcasing the members’ physical beauty over their musical prowess. Both images reflect a trend observed in other all-girl bands of careful attention placed on performance and advertising to present these musicians as a vision of idealized femininity in American culture. On one hand, she was lively, supportive, and a vision of often white beauty. On the other hand, she remained tethered to the influence of men; agreeable, somewhat childish, and novel in her new roles. Through the medium of jazz and revue shows, these bands both enforced and pushed back against this image, exploring what it meant to be a female musician in America in a rapidly shifting age.

I argue that the depiction of all-girl bands in the 1920s-1940s demonstrate an idealized image of American femininity through how they were received by the public, their presentation on stage, and their musical performance. I will first examine how a glamorous and energetic vision of American womanhood was promoted in pre-World War Il bands through novelty spectacle through The Ingenues and their association with vaudeville acts like Ziegfeld's Follies. Then, I will look at the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and highlight how activities such as USO camp visits encouraged a view of beautiful innocence and chipper support.

Drawing on documents from The Newberry Library and The Smithsonian's archives, interviews with members of the Sweethearts and prior research in the field (Tucker, 2000, McGee, 2003, Chaikin, 2011), I examine how social, cultural, and musical influences created a complex image of American femininity as sexually available yet morally pure, talented yet "amateur," and powerful yet subservient to the will of men and their country. Through this analysis, I will shift discourse away from discussing only specific female instrumentalists towards the complex dynamic of female jazz instrumentalists in general as they walked a fine line of embracing modernity while navigating traditional feminine roles.